Lexicon

by Max Barry

  She decided to buy him flowers. She would just buy flowers and a card and if he wasn’t at the hospital when she dropped them off, that was fine. She would just leave them. She sweated over what to write, firmed on THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY TOOTH, stared at it in horror, and went back to the store for a new card. On the second attempt, she went dignified. THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME. EMILY RUFF. Maybe it wasn’t completely dignified. Because she couldn’t resist writing saving me. Or supplying her full name. But she didn’t include a phone number. She managed that.

  She drove to the hospital, the flowers on the passenger seat with air blasting at them to stave off the heat. The woman at the front desk thought she was there for an appointment, which Emily guessed was logical, given the brace, and once that was straightened out, said, “Did you want to see him or just leave these?” Emily panicked and said, “Just leave them.” She got as far as the doors. “Is he here, though?” The woman looked at Emily like she had seen it all a million times before and said, “I’ll see.” She picked up the phone. Emily waited and tried not to feel fourteen years old. The woman replaced the receiver. “I’m sorry.”

  In the car, she gripped the wheel and berated herself. What would Eliot think? He would be ashamed. He’d tell her to get used to Broken Hill, because the way she was acting, she was never coming home. She might as well buy a house and get a couple of dogs and marry Harry the paramedic and live here forever.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, because that was atrocious.

  • • •

  She became Pavlovian to the bell that jangled whenever someone opened the Tangled Threads door but it was never him, and after a few days she understood that it never would be. He saw the flowers for exactly what they were: an awkward, fantastical sally at romance. She felt angry at herself, and him for making her act like that. Because, to be fair, he’d caught her in the middle of a trauma. She hadn’t been herself. Who was he to judge? He was a nobody in a dinky, blow-away town and he didn’t even have a proper ambulance. And his hair was old-fashioned. The only reason she’d even looked at him twice was he had no competition. She itched for a boy to walk in, someone young and cute and stupid. She stewed behind the counter and tidied racks until everything was the same.

  At noon, she walked to the local burger place and stood in line behind the miners—not muscular guys in sleveless shirts with picks and sexy soot stains, like you might expect, but fat truck drivers and crane operators who smelled like oil. Hardly anyone actually went into the mines anymore. That part was automated. And there was hardly anything to go into: For the most part, the mines were great open-cut quarries that looked like meteorite craters. The town surrounded a huge one, separated from it by a towering wall of mullock, which was the stuff they dragged out of the ground that wasn’t worth anything but had to be put somewhere. No one seemed to find this strange, living in a town shaped like a doughnut, slowly filling the edges of the hole with crap. She wanted to ask why they didn’t move the town about five miles north, or south or east or west, for that matter, any random direction. But she could predict the response: They would say, Because this is where it is. Australians were very practical, Emily had found. They did things quickly and purposefully and to the absolute minimum standard required. It was refreshing and genuine but sometimes led to situations like building a town around a hole. Originally she’d thought the name Broken Hill was a joke, part of the perverse humor that led them to nickname people with red hair Bluey. Because besides the mullock, the place was as flat as a mirror. But apparently there had been a hill once. It had been mined away.

  She inhaled stale sweat and cigarettes until she reached the counter, then ate her burger at a table outside, watching traffic. Everything that passed she’d seen before. She turned her head, testing her neck, and saw the paramedic van parked across the road.

  She felt panic. But she was over him, remember? She had forgotten that for a second. She relaxed. She began to look for him, casually. She hoped she did see him, so she could discover exactly how plain and boring he was when he wasn’t carrying her tooth in his mouth. She ate her burger. She saw him. It might have been him. He was coming down the sidewalk, talking to a woman. He shook his head and it definitely was him. He was cute. She might have been suffering from head trauma but she did have taste. He was broad shouldered. His arms were incredible. He was not wearing a wifebeater. As he drew closer, she pegged his age at maybe twenty-five. The woman was an attractive brunette Emily had seen featured in real estate advertisements. She laughed at something Harry said, tossing her hair, and Emily was totally fine with that. Emily wished Ms. Real Estate the very best of luck with her handsome Australian paramedic.

  She almost let them walk by. Then she decided what the hell. There was no problem, so why not? “Hello.”

  He stopped. His eyes: She had forgotten those. “You’re . . .”

  “Toothless.”

  “Right.” She saw him thinking about the flowers. He had found that awkward.

  “Just wanted to say thanks,” she said. “Don’t let me hold you up.”

  The real estate woman smiled and snaked a hand into Harry’s. He seemed relieved that she was not turning on the crazy. “No problem.” The real estate woman began to lead him away. Suddenly he skipped back to her table and stuck out his hand. “I’m Harry.”

  She took his hand, surprised, and he grinned and returned to the real estate woman. She felt unsettled. She watched him walk away. What was that? Did he just try to pick her up? That was outrageous. She picked up her Coke and looked after him again. Her heart was jumping. She thought, Ah, fuck.

  • • •

  She decided to sleep with him and get it over with. It was the only way. He had become an annoying jingle, striking in the shower, or at work, or just as she was falling asleep. She had to at least kiss him deeply and completely, in a way that left nothing behind. So she could move on. So she could stop imagining it. She couldn’t keep losing herself to the jingle. It was impairing her ability to function. Once she turned him into a toy, like those boys in Tangled Threads, it would be all right. She would be back in control.

  She bought a dress, a little black scrap from Tangled Threads that she’d talked away from three potential customers in case of an occasion like this. She did her hair, going for volume—not the kind of hair girls liked; the kind for boys. She detonated mascara. Friday night, she pushed into a smoke-filled sweat tank in the main bar, the pub, and looked for him. The place was full of bright-eyed teenagers and crusted-on miners, opposing demographics, normally, united by their passion for beer and angry guitars. A boy screamed, “Vince!” in her ear. These were reasons she did not normally come here. She negotiated a lap and began to feel discouraged. Then she spied him at the bar with a few other young men in collared shirts. She walked up and yelled, “Hi!”

  Harry smiled at her.

  “Buy me a drink!” she said.

  • • •

  Four hours later, her head buzzing, she was in the passenger seat of his paramedic van, being driven home. Not to her home. To his. She had unsnapped her seat belt and draped herself across him, kissing his neck, nibbling his ear, which was an excellent way to die in a car accident, if she’d thought about that. But she hadn’t. She thought only of getting him alone in a room and doing terrible things. He drove and drove and finally stopped. A dog slobbered on her legs and she screamed and he picked her up. She liked that. It reminded her of how they’d met. His house was dark but there was a bed and a moon outside. She tried to unbutton his pants and he said no, and she said, Yes, putting some emphasis behind it, a little lower frequency that sounded commanding, but it didn’t work. On the bed he touched her neck and this was what she had been missing, she realized: All of her predatory behavior had included no reciprocity. And that was important. She had forgotten. She went after him again and this time he took her wrists in one hand and trapped them on the pillow above her head. “I want you,” she said. “Let me touch you.”

 
“No,” he said, and she found this even more arousing, for some reason. She did enjoy a challenge. But his hands moved down her body and she lost the will to argue. “Yes,” she said, “yes, yes.” She saw glittering eyes in the darkness outside, his dog, watching them, but she didn’t care. She was going someplace else. His touch was careful and she hadn’t really known what it was like to be cared for. It was a night of newness. He held her and his fingers moved inside her and then her climax moved through her like a thunderclap, like a force of nature, something she could not control at all, and she had to lie still until she could find herself. He let go of her wrists. He was still wearing pants. She needed to address that. “Now,” she said, and finally he nodded, and said, “Now,” and she basically attacked him.

  • • •

  In the morning she woke and he was not there. She sat up. The bedroom had no curtains. Beyond the window was flat earth as far as the horizon. The bedroom was a crime scene of twisted sheets and scattered clothes. Aside from the bed, there was no furniture. No paintings. No photos.

  On the kitchen table she found a note:

  Gone for a ride. Help yourself to brekky.

  A ride, she thought. He had gone for a ride. He had departed on some mode of transport to an unnamed destination for unknown reasons for an indeterminate length of time. She was glad he had explained that. She investigated the room. There was a photo of the dog on the TV. It was the only really personal thing she could see, so she picked it up. A big dog. A man’s dog. She put the photo back. She was not so desperate for insight into Harry that she needed to analyze his dog. She went into the kitchen and pulled open the fridge.

  She ate cereal. She showered. She padded naked into his bedroom and rifled through his wardrobe. She saw no books. She didn’t know what he did with himself. She started the dishes, and while scrubbing a pot suffered a sudden, appalling flash of perspective. He was waiting for her to leave. That was what the note meant. She dropped the brush and went to look for her clothes.

  • • •

  There was a joke, or puzzle, that went like this: A woman meets a man at her mother’s funeral. They hit it off, but the woman never gets the man’s name, and afterward she can’t find him. A few days later, she murders her sister. You were supposed to figure out why. But if you did, it meant you were a psychopath, because the reason was the woman wanted to meet the man again. Emily thought about this a few times over the next few days, when she found herself fantasizing about staging a medical emergency.

  She finally drove out to his house. It was dark and she got lost on the dusty roads and she almost went home a dozen times. Because it was one thing to sleep with him. It was another to go back. What she was doing felt dangerous. Like sailing off the edge of the world.

  Eventually, she trundled up the long driveway. The house lights were on but she left the engine idling, because she still wasn’t sure she should be here. Or, rather, she knew, but wanted to anyway. The front door opened. He came out, shielding his eyes. When he saw her, he smiled. That decided it. She got out of the car. “Is this a bad time?” She was being polite.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “I thought I’d come see you.”

  “Glad you did.”

  She hung by the car.

  “Come in,” he said, and she did.

  • • •

  Three months later she moved in. She was effectively living there anyway. She suggested it during the credits for an Australian comedy that he loved and she was growing to hate less and less. “I should move in,” she said. Maybe it wasn’t a suggestion. But that was how she meant it. She used persuasion techniques on Harry sometimes, but nothing he couldn’t break. She liked it that way: trying to manipulate him and failing. If she’d had his words, it would have been different. There would have been no challenge at all.

  She cooked for him. She actually cracked eggs and fried them up and carried them to him on a tray. When she lay in the crook of his arm, she felt safe. He took her riding. He had dirt bikes, a garage full of them, and they went bouncing across the countryside. He taught her how to hold a rifle so it didn’t bruise her shoulder, how much to allow for the tug of gravity on a bullet over distance. When the night was clear, they sat on the back porch, drinking and making love as the sun dissolved into earth. Before this, she had only ever viewed the sky as hostile. He made her notice the raw beauty in it, the power in the blasted earth and skeletal trees. How it was all there for a reason. Even the snakes, which Emily would never stop being terrified about—they were everywhere you least expected them, like deadly ropes—she came to see less as belligerent and more as aggressively defensive, like her. She had lived in Broken Hill for two years and never understood it.

  The first time he shot a kangaroo, she cried. She’d known he hunted them, that they were vermin, but the sight of the brown fur in the dust, the oddly human lips peeled back from small teeth, was too much. “They’re pests,” he said. “Eat anything that grows.”

  “Still,” she said.

  He set the rifle against the bike. “You know the story about the kangaroo?”

  “What story?”

  “The blackfellas’ story.” He meant the aboriginals. “There was a girl, Minnawara. She was clever, good with a spear. Eyes that could spot a kookaburra a kilometer away. One day, she stole a sling. The sling was supposed to belong to the whole tribe, but Minnawara hid it in a pouch. When the tribe discovered the sling was missing, they became very angry, and the elder asked Minnawara if she’d taken it. And she said no. So the elder put magic on the ground, and the ground began to get hot. The elder said, ‘Are your feet warm, Minnawara?’ That was the magic. Only someone who lied would feel the heat. She said no, her feet were fine. But soon she couldn’t stand it, so she began to hop from one foot to the other. And then she jumped. The elder said, ‘Why are you jumping, Minnawara?’ and she said, ‘I like to jump. I will always jump.’ And she did; she jumped everywhere for the rest of her days, because she was too stubborn to give up the sling. Her feet grew long and tough, and she was the first kangaroo.”

  “That makes it worse,” Emily said. “Now it feels personal.” She looked at poor Minnawara.

  “But she’s a thief,” said Harry.

  • • •

  He didn’t talk. That is, he didn’t talk without a specific purpose. She found this unnerving. It made her wonder what he wasn’t saying. At first she probed him relentlessly, asking about politics, putting unlikely hypotheticals to him about their relationship over dinner. One night, just as he was drifting off, she said, “Who do you think is smarter, you or me?”

  She was a person who needed to know things. She didn’t want to guess what was in his head. She wanted to hear him say it. This was how she avoided surprises. One day she found an odd contraption in his shed, a tangle of frayed rope and petrified wood, and marched it to him where he was repairing a fence post, three hundred yards away. “What’s this?”

  He glanced at it. “Mobile.”

  “What does that mean?” She shook it. Dust fell. It looked about a million years old. Each section of petrified wood had a dark mark on it, and some of the marks looked strange.

  “It’s a mobile,” he said. “For babies.”

  She sat in the dirt. “You need to talk more. This, ‘it’s a mobile,’ isn’t enough for me. Understand?” No, she saw. “Why do you have a mobile? Where did it come from? What are these marks? What do you think about it?”

  He sat up.

  “I’m not used to people who don’t talk,” she said. “It’s honestly freaking me out.”

  He pulled her toward him, which she resisted, for a moment. His arms around her, the smell of his sweat spoiling her judgment, he said, “You think I need to say something to make it real.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I think.”

  He composed his thoughts, taking his time. “My father was a miner. Back when the mines were bigger. When he found something interesting down there, he brought it home. He
made that mobile for me before I was born. I found it when I went through his stuff after he died. Decided to keep it in case I ever need it. I think it’s a good mobile.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thank you, that’s all I needed, was that so hard?”

  He began to kiss her. Things deteriorated. But later she thought about what he’d said. About not needing to say something to make it real. This contradicted what she’d been taught. The brain used language to frame concepts: it employed words to identify and organize its own chemical soup. A person’s tongue even determined how they thought, to a degree, due to the subtle logical pathways that were created between concepts represented by similar-looking or -sounding words. So, yes, words did make things real, in at least one important way. But they were also just symbols. They were labels, not the things they labeled. You didn’t need words to feel. She decided he had a point. But it felt so strange.

  • • •

  He was a catch, of course. Women stopped her in the street to congratulate her. They cackled and wished her all the best. She was going down in Broken Hill folklore as the Girl Who Tamed Harry. There was a history, obviously. A procession of Girls Who Had Not Tamed Harry. But she didn’t ask about that. Not even when she ran into the real estate woman who had been with Harry before, the two approaching each other down a grocery store aisle like reluctant jousters. The whole time they were talking, the woman telling Emily about the benefits of freshly squeezed orange juice versus concentrate, Emily was thinking: What happened? Because this woman had been with Harry and now she wasn’t, so how had that happened, exactly? How did Harry handle a relationship breakup? Was he cruel? Deceitful? Indifferent? These were questions she wanted answered. But she didn’t ask them. She knew not to go snooping around for an ending unless she wanted one. She realized now that until she had come to Broken Hill, she had never been happy.